The number of mobile applications for mobile devices is exponentially increasing. At the same time, service operators desire a network to be able to recognize what the service operators consider to be important applications to provide different service treatments with respect to these applications. For example, some operators may offer packaged services, which may include free data usages for particular applications. For this type of provisioning, operators may look to the network to be able to detect a specific application in less than ten packets for billing purposes, for example.
Some application providers have numerous applications. Google™, for example, hosts many applications, such as Gmail™, Google Drive™, Youtube™, Google Map™, Google Hangout™ etc. These applications can share common content delivery network (CDN) servers. With this sharing, recognizing one application, such as the Google map application, in near real time becomes challenging. In addition, encryption of traffic is increasing. It has been predicted that by 2019, 80% of network traffic will be encrypted. With the deployment of the newest versions of transport layer security (TLS), which is an encryption protocol that provides communications security over a network, and the deployment of quick UDP (User Datagram Protocol) internet connections (QUIC), which is a transport layer network protocol, accurately recognizing an application becomes more difficult.